Reads Only

by Andrew Lambert

Product details

• Format Paperback | 360 pages
• Dimensions 156 x 235 x 30.48mm | 445g
• Publication date 11 Jun 2018
• Publisher Yale University Press
• Publication City/Country United States
• Language English
• Edition Statement Reprint
• Illustrations note w. 175 col. and 25 b&w illus.
• ISBN10 0300234171
• ISBN13 9780300234176
• Bestsellers rank 101,751

Product details

• Format Paperback | 512 pages
• Dimensions 152 x 229 x 30.48mm | 658g
• Publication date 01 Nov 2010
• Publisher Yale University Press
• Publication City/Country New Haven, United States
• Language English
• Edition Revised
• Edition Statement Revised ed.
• Illustrations note black & white illustrations, black & white halftones
• ISBN10 0300165323
• ISBN13 9780300165326
• Bestsellers rank 95,643

Product details

• Format Paperback | 608 pages
• Dimensions 156 x 235 x 38.1mm | 680g
• Publication date 28 Jan 2008
• Publisher Yale University Press
• Publication City/Country New Haven, CT, United States
• Language English
• Illustrations note 16 pp. b-w illus.
• ISBN10 0300126891
• ISBN13 9780300126891
• Bestsellers rank 96,296

by John R. Bockstoce

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009

xxi plus 472 pp. Illustrations, appendix, glossary, bibliography, and index.

Reviewed by James A. Hanson

While Russian entrepreneurs and American and European maritime traders had opened commerce with Alaska and the Northwest Coast decades earlier, the vast region above Bering Strait remained unknown until 1819, when an American ship, the General San Martin under Captain Eliab Grimes, attempted to open trade with the natives. He quickly discovered that instead of being welcomed as the harbinger of commerce, his arrival was seen as a threat to the voluminous commerce between the Eskimos and the Chuckchis of Asia that had recently developed due to the expansion of trade between Russia and China for furs, ivory, tea, porcelain, and fabrics. Anxious to protect their roles as suppliers and middlemen, the natives were aggressive and bellicose.

The narrative proceeds both chronologically and geographically to explain the recent growth of this commerce, summarizing Russian expansion across Siberia to Alaska, the arrival of American and British competitors, first by sea and then by land via the Mackenzie River. Efforts to find the Northwest Passage and then the Franklin Expedition led to increased contact and exploration. These were followed by commercial whaling fleets, the transfer of Russian America to the United States, chaos from economic competition, destructive exploitation of resources, and starvation and disease. The book ends on the hopeful note of an evolving economy returning to the fur boom of the early twentieth century accompanied by better and more active government supervision.

Bockstoce presents the reader a complete package by discussing the furs and marine mammal products such as baleen and ivory that were important in the trade, how these were procured and in what quantities, and how the products were then transported and marketed. He does the same with trade goods, delineating the products supplied by indigenous traders, then the Russians, the British Hudson’s Bay Company traders, and whalers who wintered along the Bering Sea coast, and finally the goods sold by the Alaska Commercial Company, heir to the Russian American Company mercantile empire. The significant effects of certain introduced goods--- for example, iron for tools and even jewelry, firearms, and circassian tobacco, are wonderfully documented and make the book a real treasure.

In fact, this book is as near perfect as I think any book about the fur trade can be. It sensitively examines its subject from all sides and from top to bottom. The opinions and actions of the traders, the natives, and the politicians are presented; we learn about the goods, the products, the methods of conducting the trade, and the changing nature of commerce. All the issues, from liquor to destruction of food sources, from diseases to cultural dislocation, are discussed with succinctness, clarity, and dispassion. The bibliography and notes are most complete. The glossary and chronology will both prove useful to the reader. The maps are simply exquisite, and the illustrations are perfect accompaniments to the text. The book is a gold mine of information for historians, geographers, ethnologists, and antiquarians. It shows what can be done by a perceptive scholar who has complete command of the subject and of the English language. I am sure that such a combination is an occurrence worthy of our attention.

Heroic Failure and the British

by Stephanie Barczewski

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016


Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


When it comes to 'heroic failure,' the phrase today seems somehow already associated with Britain -- or, at least, with popular notions about British history and attitudes. And yet the phrase rings American, and indeed among its earliest uses is in reference to John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry. Since then, it's come to be used more in sarcasm than in seriousness, casting aspersions upon those who seem to fit its mold, as well as sealing off any consideration of what impulses or values might lie behind it.

That is, until now. Stephanie Barczewski's new volume collects and considers many of the most iconic moments to which this seemingly oxymoronic phrase has been applied, and does so with gusto. In an age when we trade other peoples' "epic fail" moments on Facebook, and take shelter in schadenfreude, we are perhaps in need of a refresher course in the higher stakes for which humans were, once upon a time, willing to find admiration in disaster.

Ms. Barczewski offers us a sort of 'greatest hits' of such events -- the Battle of Chillianwallah, the Charge of the Light Brigade, General Gordon's occupation of Khartoum, and the 'last stand' at Isandlwana in the Zulu War. And, extending the stakes of war into the peaceful endeavors of explorers, she adds Sir John Franklin, David Livingstone, and Robert Falcon Scott to her list. It's a complex, widely historically-spaced series of stories to tell, and a less energetic writer might not have managed it; Barczewski's success is due in large part to her skill at seizing the essentials of each story, while building on the general resonance of her theme until it reaches 1812-overture proportions.

But this energy also has its drawbacks. Taking just her account of Sir John Franklin's final Arctic voyage, the chapter is sprinkled with sundry errors of detail, from describing the area into which he ventured in 1845 as "Canada" (which only came into being in 1867), to mis-numbering his men (130, rather than 129), to representing a conjectural account of Francis Crozier's actions in the expedition's final months as though it were settled fact. The account is not helped by the fact that a portrait of James Clark Ross is misidentified as Franklin's, or that the Franklin memorial in the chapel at Greenwich is repeatedly stated to be in the Painted Hall instead. And yet, despite these issues (which will probably not trouble non-specialist readers), she gets the essential feel of the expedition right, noting how, as the mystery of its disappearance deepened, the quest for the Northwest Passage was moved to the back burner, until its heroic, yet fatal completion by Franklin came to serve the larger myth. Along the way, she illustrates her account with some lovely lesser-known bits of Frankliniana, including the execrable poem in his memory penned by Owen Alexander Vidal, whose prize from Oxford can only be explained by the fervor felt by the public for some immediate gratification of their warm spirits.

And it's these warm spirits, in the end, that Barczewski's main explanation -- that the British deployed their heroic failures to offset their imperialistic ambitions in the public eye -- can't quite find a way to grasp. For instance, in a connection that goes oddly unmentioned in this book, Lord Tennyson's poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" was -- at the request of Lady Franklin! -- printed and distributed in great numbers to British troops in the Crimea, including those in hospital. What earthly reason, we might wonder today, would anyone conceive of such a poem as warming the spirits of soldiers still embroiled in a conflict in which "some one had blundered" to such a degree? The answer can only be that, whatever offset such accounts may seem to offer against the perceived sins of Britain, in the time in which they were penned, they served quite the opposite function: that men, "theirs not to reason why," would follow an erroneous order to their deaths, was not a cover for shame, but a cause of pride, however politically incorrect some might feel such pride to be today.

Product details

• Format Paperback | 488 pages
• Dimensions 156 x 235 x 27.94mm | 680g
• Publication date 12 Oct 2012
• Publisher Yale University Press
• Publication City/Country New Haven, CT, United States
• Language English
• Edition Statement Reprint
• Illustrations note 19 b-w illus.
• ISBN10 0300187491
• ISBN13 9780300187496
• Bestsellers rank 664,156

Product details

• Format Paperback | 256 pages
• Dimensions 155.96 x 234.19 x 20.57mm | 476.27g
• Publication date 15 Jun 2006
• Publisher Texas Tech Press,U.S.
• Publication City/Country Texas, United States
• Language English
• Illustrations note Illustrations, maps
• ISBN10 0896725804
• ISBN13 9780896725805
• Bestsellers rank 1,047,349